One Heck of a Correction by Howard Kurtz

Howard Kurtz has quite a correction today! It seems that Howie mistakenly believed he was interviewing a Congressman, when in fact he was speaking to the Congressman's spokesperson. Weirder: Kurtz waited more than a month to correct the story. [Updated]

In late November, Kurtz wrote a story in The Daily Beast about "tough-talking" Republican Rep. Darrell Issa. The story was based on what Kurtz thought was a phone interview with Issa. But it turns out that, no, Kurtz had actually been speaking to Issa's spokesman, Kurt Bardella, the entire time. Hate when that happens! Today, Kurtz writes:

On Nov. 29, after my story ran on The Daily Beast, I got a note from Bardella saying there had been "a little confusion" and "it wasn't the congressman you spoke with, it was me speaking in his capacity as his spokesman."

Bardella had never told me that during the conversation, though there was one reference to "Darrell Issa" that I attributed to lawmakers sometimes speaking of themselves in the third person. To my best understanding, none of the opinions ascribed to Rep. Issa are inaccurate. But it's now clear the attribution should have been to his spokesman, and I erred in not dealing with this matter immediately.

“I screwed up,” Kurtz told POLITICO. “I was so puzzled by the note that Bardella sent – about my not having talked to the man I repeatedly called congressman, and who identified himself as Darrell Issa – that I wasn’t sure how serious he was. He didn’t ask for a correction, which he certainly is entitled to if I wasn’t in fact talking to Darrell Issa. Then I got busy with other things and I let it slip, and that was a mistake on my part.”

Part of his mistake, he said, was not talking to his editors about it until recently.

“What made me realize that I should have dealt with this at the time, and I am kicking myself over that, was a call from Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker who had apparently gotten wind of the ‘confusion’ from Bardella,” he said, explaining that Lizza was working on a piece about Issa. “And then I did what I should have done immediately, which was just lay it all out.”